Omar Usman – CEO Of Your Career 3 Things I Learned from Managing Oneself Peter Drucker

In this video, I'm sharing 3 things I

learned from the book Managing Oneself by Peter

Drucker. This book, the basics of it, is

a really short book, and it's basically how

to become the CEO of your own career,

how to take charge and set yourself up

for success. The first thing that I learned

was to use feedback analysis to identify your

strengths. Now this is a little bit of

a different angle. We understand how to find

our strengths. We'll take assessment tests, for example,

strength finder 2.0.

We'll interview friends and ask people close to

us or coworkers, you know, what are my

strengths? What am I good at? What types

of things do you think that I succeed

at? And we also tend to kinda look

back at our own past accomplishments and try

to figure out, like, well, I did that

really well, and I did this thing really

well.

The problem with that is it's a little

bit more subjective and even with our own

selves, we look at our own accomplishments with

a little bit of, you know, positive revisionist

history. What Rekka recommends doing is to create

a system where you sit down and take

the things that you're working on and say,

okay,

9 months out, 12 months out,

these are the results that I expect. And

after a year you can visit it and

benchmark and see, okay,

did I actually hit the target that I

was expecting? Did I exceed expectations? Did I

meet them? Did I fall below them? And

using that method, you can identify

from a more database perspective,

here are the things that I was good

at. Now another thing about your strengths, he

said you should operate in your strength zone,

but one thing to keep in mind is

don't become intellectually arrogant

because of a certain level of expertise. So

he gives an example that, let's say, an

engineer might say, look, I'm very quantitative, I

need data, I'm very scientific,

don't bother me with feelings and emotions and

people things. On the other hand, you might

have, let's say, an HR person who says,

okay, look I'm a very strong people person,

don't bother me with these basic accounting things

and this and that. Now

he says you do want to operate and

work in your strength zone, but at the

same time, you need to know functionally what

you need in order to be successful at

that strengths area. So for example, let's say

you've got a creative person, photographer, artist, graphic

designer,

but they might say, you know what, I'm

terrible at communication, I'm terrible at email, and

and so they never communicate with their clients.

Chances are they'll lose a lot of their

business. So

they might not be strong at communication to

the point where they become like a project

manager,

but they need to be functional in the

sense that they have to be good enough

where it allows them to be able to

do the creative work very well.

The other thing that Drucker says is to

make sure that you focus on improving your

strengths as much as possible. We we know

we've kinda heard this, But one thing that

he laid out that I thought was really

interesting was he said that it takes a

lot more work

to go from completely incompetent

to even a level of being mediocre

than it does to go from good to

great or even great to excellent. So once

you determine your strengths,

put the bulk of your effort there and

focus on getting as good as possible.

The second thing that I learned from this

book was Drucker saying make a decision as

to whether you're an advisor or a decision

maker. And this kinda plays with the whole

strengths thing. He says some people are better

suited to an advisory capacity, meaning that they

can offer input, they can help to shape

decision making,

and other people are strong decision makers, meaning

they can take that info, they can be

decisive, commit, and then execute.

You know, the thing is that we all

want to be the decision maker, we all

wanna be the top person. You have to

identify where you where you operate best. One

thing that he gives us an example, he

says someone that might be a number one

person, so they're a really good decision maker,

their number 2 almost by definition will be

a strong advisor because that decision maker needs

a trusted advisor

in that role to help them make decisions.

Now when something happens to that number one

person and they're out of that role, the

number 2 person gets promoted and now what

do you have? You have someone who's a

strong adviser put into a decision making capacity

and a lot of times it doesn't work

out so well. So identify which one of

these roles works best for you and then

go forward. The third thing that I learned

was to prepare for the second half of

your career during the first half. Now a

lot of people there's, you know, they're in

a job where they might not be so

passionate about it or they might have the

whole, well, I do this by day but

on weekends I do something else. And so

Drucker says identify that work that gives you

that meaningful contribution and fulfillment

and start doing it early. And he says

that, you know, you have to set yourself

up. If you're passionate about a non profit

or, you know, some type of non profit

work,

if you don't volunteer anytime before the age

of 40, you're probably not gonna do it

after the age of 60 no matter how

many times you tell yourself that once I

retire I'm gonna do this. You have to

take those steps ahead of time. So if

you've got something else that gives you more

fulfillment, that gives you more meaning, set yourself

up earlier. Take on side projects,

take on freelance work, take it on as

a hobby, but whatever it is that you

wanna do, you have to start doing it

much earlier than you think. So that when

the opportunity comes you can make that transition.

And the other thing is that in an

age where there's not as much uncertain where

there is a lot of uncertainty

and we don't know that we're gonna be

the same career for a long period of

time, the more skills that we develop on

the side, the more things that we're able

to get good at, the more opportunity that

we create for ourselves

for the times that we need it. That's

3 things I learned from the book Managing

Oneself by Peter Drucker. If you enjoyed the

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thanks